Wednesday, January 24, 2007

Evens & Starts

New phonebooks. Meaning, in this case, the '07 Fenway improvements. I like these new glimpses into the park from outside. Like the new visitors' batting cage that's visible from Game On, and--because they don't need the batting cage in center anymore--a restaurant that looks out through the center field wall! That, my friend, is a sweet idea. Great job by Janet Marie Smith as usual. The Awesomeness Grill will be open around the All-Star break, and will be a year round deal.

Did you see this article about the Fenway dating show? (Watch the Steinberg interview, too. That guy cracks me up. Where is he for that interview? Did they run into him in the library or something?) The idea sounded familiar to me. So I searched "Fenway dating service," and the old article came up. It was from last summer, about a dude who started a dating service for Sox fans. I remembered this because I told the guy to "shit on his own face" at the time. Still, he should sue.

Somebody at SFist (It started with Gothamist, now it's "every other city"-ist, and they're all, just, really internet-y and thinks-they're-the-shit-y. I shouldn't say "all." But I don't intend to do the research.) reviewed a David Cross show, and called him a bigot and said the audience didn't like him. I am a big fan of David's, and I was happy to see he didn't just let it go. He commented on the post. Every once in a while, after responding to a comment here, someone will tell me to pick my battles, acting like I'm the crazy one, when all I'm doing is defending myself. It's good to see an actual celebrity respond to what's said about them in a public forum. The way the world is going, this will become a much more common thing. "Stars" will be people who have grown up having their thoughts documented online well before they became famous. That should lead to more of them not being so isolated from their own fans. Anyway, there are a lot of comments after David's. I was really laughing at his second one, number 47 (they're numbered, you don't have to count).

Speaking of people who think they're journalists, like the aforementioned -ist crew, have you heard this clip of the ESPN guy supposedly saying the term "Jew" in a rant about Payton Manning? I guess the guy's a tool anyway, but it just makes no sense to me that he'd say "We'll Jew." The "proof" is that one person on a message board said he heard it, and then another site had the audio clip sent to it by "a reader." The clip sounds weird, like it's cut right after he says "Ju--." (to make it sound like "Jew.") Also, there's some background music that stops at that exact moment. ESPN did make a statement that he said "chew." Whether that's true or not, them saying this implies the clip is genuine (although I haven't seen any video of it yet). It doesn't sound like "chew." It sounds like "Ju--." He could've been starting to say a word, then cutting it short. Hey, maybe the word he was trying to stop was indeed "Jew." If it was, of course, terrible job by him. But the point of this is that I looked at the AOL "Top News Stories" today, and number five was this story. The link was to an AOL Sports Blog, written by a dude who also writes another, non-paying, blog. Just some guy. He links the same audio clip that was sent in by a reader to the original site. Apparently, some guy read and heard what the rest of us read and heard, wrote his opinion on it, and that's the fifth most important "news story" of the day. I'm down with "voice of the people" and all that crap, but this sounds like a flawed system. We might as well have Dirt Dog writing for the Globe...oh, wait. (Sorry, no links to any of this nonsense. You can find it. I believe in you.)

If you're gonna talk about "the internet," you can pretty much just use the real term at this point. "Interwebs" and similar terms just aren't funny anymore.

Unfortunately, it looks like our long, national nightmare of people referring to ongoing yet trite stories as "our long, national nightmare" in an attempt to get laughs isn't over yet.